Hit Labs connects Teams Pronto with MariaDB Xpand

Hit Labs, the creators behind the all-in-one communication platform Pronto, is powering its business with Xpand, MariaDB’s distributed SQL database, deployed on a fully managed cloud database service MariaDB SkySQL running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Facing a fast-growing user base, Pronto turned to Xpand in SkySQL for its elasticity and high availability – making it easy to scale out and onboard millions of users. To give their team the ability to focus fully on delivering the best communications experience to their customers, Pronto also brought in SkyDBAs for proactive and expert care of its cloud databases.

A Cloud Database That Expands to Meet Seasonal Peaks

Pronto provides a mobile-optimized communication platform for higher education institutions through chat, video conferencing, announcement tools, automatic language translation, file sharing and task management. Given a large part of its business supports higher education institutions, much of Pronto’s seasonal peaks are aligned with the academic school year. Pronto turned to Xpand in SkySQL for its elasticity and high availability with zero downtime to support their changing needs throughout the year. With SkySQL, Pronto only pays for the resources used, giving them the ability to save costs if they scale back during summer break.

“Moving to the cloud with MariaDB Xpand in SkySQL was an easy decision for us,” said TJ Hunter, software engineer and co-founder at Pronto. “Since the pandemic started, higher education institutions and professors rely heavily on our product Pronto as their remote learning solution. Powered by SkySQL, Pronto onboards thousands of students within minutes, allowing educators to communicate directly with their students, in addition to students communicating with other students. Xpand in SkySQL lets us scale horizontally to meet these new demands with the push of a button so we can focus on growing our business.”

Personalized Office Hours with SkyDBAs

By being a small and lean organization, many of Pronto’s resources are focused on enhancing product offerings for its customers. With SkyDBAs, Pronto gets expert database support at a fraction of the cost, allowing them to offload many of its database responsibilities and operations such as daily maintenance, backup and disaster recovery. “Our SkyDBAs are great and we consider them an extension of our team,” said Hunter. “They provide proactive 24x7 expert care to ensure we’re getting the best performance and quickly resolving any issues. They’ve been instrumental in taking things off my plate and exploring options to optimize our operations.”